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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I expect better phrasing than “Forever Chemicals” from Scientific American. Using ‘chemical’ as a scare word is unbefitting of actual science. I mean water is a “forever chemical “ by their definition.

I’m not saying there are not harmful chemicals in drinking water, I'm not saying this article isn't raising good points. I just think using “chemical” the way it’s used by fear mongers who don’t understand or care that literally everything is a chemical isn’t helpful.

Here is a post from Scientific American on the very topic

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/chemical-is-...

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What an unhelpful comment. The phrasing is defined in the article

>These compounds may take hundreds, or even thousands, of years to break down in the environment. They can also persist in the human body, potentially causing health problems.

It is clear that this means "Teflon" and similar molecules that aren't processed biologically. "Forever chemicals" here is excellent phrasing. They in fact last an indefinite amount of time in the ecosystem, and they are "chemicals" in that they are not naturally occurring.

For you to insist this is fearmongering is disingenuous and you should feel ashamed. This isn't at all the same as calling water "dihydrogen monoxide" and hyping up fear of "chemicals". There is in fact an active industry that promotes the production of these compounds for reasons of profit, and the externalities thereof are not at all taken into account by the mainstream understanding.

> they are "chemicals" in that they are not naturally occurring

That is my point entirely. That is not the definition of chemical. If you mean non-naturally occurring chemical say that.

The scaremongers definition of chemical and has no place in scientific literature.

Except this is how laypeople perceive chemicals when they react to them as a (possible) threat. They conflate "chemical" with a compound beyond natural complexity. Humans excel at creating compounds that naturally do not naturally occur in abundance for thermodynamic reasons. Chlorofluorocarbons come to mind immediately.

So how is it scaremongering? It is both accurate (PFOAs, etc are indeed chemicals) and of the proper connotation in the common parlance (using "chemical" to mean something manmade rather than naturally occurring).

Your argument holds no water.

By the way, an article in Scientific American isn't scientific literature. It's a magazine intended at lay audiences. You might be confusing it with something like Nature journal.

If someone is patently wrong about something in an unhelpful way, feeding into it is counterproductive.

Using chemical to mean something man made is factually incorrect. It's in our best interest to educate against its misuse rather than acknowledge/encourage it, particularly in this case because the line between the two things is hazy at best.

I think your reaction is a bit too strong, which perhaps makes you miss a subtler point better. This use of the word "chemical" seems to be a thought-terminating cliché of sorts and I would argue it is precisely what leads to overreaction in cases such as dihydrogen monoxide.

People learn to associate "chemical" with "bad" and a certain class of "chemical-sounding" names with "chemical". It would be better if the lay knowledge and perception of chemicals was more nuanced, so that it is realized that chemicals are not bad due to their membership in this category, but for other, more complex reasons.

There are bad chemicals and there are good chemicals, and there is no shortcut to knowing which is which other than putting effort into understanding the mechanisms.

I think penalising this usage of the word "chemical" might further this goal.

You have to take the entire phrase “forever chemicals” together. It’s a subset of chemicals that don’t break down / take a long time to break down and can’t be processed by the human body. At that point, it becomes a well defined phrase no matter what your opinion on the word chemical by itself means or implies.

Water is by that definition a “forever chemical“

For you to insist this is fearmongering is disingenuous and you should feel ashamed.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

> [The thing that was said] is [description] and you should feel ashamed.

This is replying to the argument, and not calling names. You're right that the latter part was unnecessary, though.

It's not a fear mongering term. It properly describes the risk. Fear mongering would be "water death chemicals", but considering how serious of an issue this is I'm not even sure that should be considered fear mongering.

"Chemical" is not used as a scare word here, "Forever" is

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